(Beer) Content Is Queen

Yesterday evening, my friend Jill and I did a very Millennial thing. We spent an hour taking photos of each other for the sake of “creating” content. Don’t get me wrong—you can tell by my Instagram that I don’t have a photographer following me around wherever I go. Hell, I’m not that great of a photographer myself. Most of my beer-related content is pictures of beer. That makes sense, right?

So saying stupid shit to make each other laugh while we snapped photos in a beautiful place didn’t feel too cringeworthy since she needed a new “professional” headshot and I can always use more beer content with my face on it. Besides, my life is content, so I’m used to it. My day job is content marketing (which I dig because I love to create), my side hobby of beer blogging is constant content creation, and even the seven succulents I planted this weekend are the freshest content of my home office feed. Content is good, content is great.

My eyes start to glaze over when the line between content and copy get blurred. I don’t expect many to know that difference (I just learned it myself!), but the main gist goes: “copy sells, content tells.” On one hand, copy places a product in front of you and asks you to take it (or leave it). On the other hand, content tells stories and each piece adds to a larger narrative. Stories. Are. My. Shit. I love when a brewery prints a colorful description or origin story on a beer label. Nothing too crazy—wordiness is not godliness, and words aren’t the end all be all, either. A can wrapped in a gorgeous graphic catches my eye quicker than anything written. It still tells a story.

Some marketers come from the house of “quantity to keep top-of-mind” and others stay true to “quality content or nothing.” I wish all small businesses/breweries had the resources to put out their best content consistently, but I know firsthand that’s easier said than done. When put into beer terms, no one wants a ton of crappy beer all the time (although I do imagine Gary Vee as the marketing equivalent of Big Beer). Being run by normal humans, how can we expect top-notch content from craft breweries all the time? Taking advantage of that precise fact, I think. Regular people consume content through narratives because regular people relay information through stories. It’s the circle of content!

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Published by Emma Schmitz

Emma Schmitz is a content marketer & writer based in Truckee, CA. In her free time, she enjoys mountain biking, splitboarding, practicing the dark yarn arts, and nerding out about craft beer.
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